While we’re always up for trying a new experimental release out, we figured it was high time we covered this artist in some degree, since Scott and I both share a love for his music. Scott Walker (no relation to the politician of the same name) was once a singer/songwriter on the road to becoming an act on the scale of The Beatles or The Who as part of The Walker Brothers, but who, in a Beatles-esque fashion, eschewed fame and pop-oriented songwriting after a while and decided to go in an avant-garde direction. After some ups and downs, and a solo career that had a fair amount of misses as well as successes, Walker has planted himself as one of the foremost experimental musicians of the modern era, with his later trilogy (consisting of Tilt, The Drift, and Bish Bosch) being of particular acclaim, along with collaborations with bands like Sunn O))).

Friday means weird and/or obscure music on Heavy Blog, but today what we’re covering isn’t necessarily weird or obscure—at least, not on the surface. Autechre are a British electronic duo (consisting of Sean Booth and Robert Brown) that are pretty well known in intelligent dance music circles (a.k.a IDM), and, alongside artists like Aphex…

Normally, Heavy Vanguard has been about the album format, and giving significant releases of that size some much-needed attention. Today, however, we’re slightly tweaking that formula and instead covering a single composition: “Threnody To The Victims Of Hiroshima” by legendary (at least in modern classical circles) Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. For…

It’s Friday, and you know what that means: it’s time to get weird. Today’s dive into the eerie, often unsettling waters of the avant-garde finds Scott and I going over an artist that I had personally never heard of: Diamanda Galás. Galás is a singer (and performance artist) whose vocal work usually incorporates…

It’s a new year, and that means that Scott and I are continuing our quest of finding the weirdest, coolest, most out-there music on the planet (and possibly beyond if we can raise enough money on our non-existent Kickstarter). And today, we have what was actually my third favorite album of…

Happy Holidays, and welcome to Heavy Vanguard, where the music is as weird and awesome as you can get. We’ve sort of been on the jazzier side of the avant-garde as of late, what with focuses on Captain Beefheart, and our last episode on Soft Machine, but Scott managed to even it out…

Welcome again to Heavy Vanguard—your ticket to the farthest and weirdest reaches of music. While avant-garde and experimental music is, again, strange upon first listen, it’s also massively important to music as a whole. After all, innovation doesn’t happen through repetition; it takes people willing to take chances on new things and mark uncharted territory for us to truly move forward. And no other album we’ve covered so far (with the possible exception of Trout Mask Replica) has been as far-reaching and influential as the one we cover this week: Soft Machine’s iconic album Third.

Welcome back to Heavy Vanguard, where Scott Murphy and I explore the strangest, most dense compositions that music has to offer. This week we explore Loren Connor’s album Red Mars: an album that, while experimental, comes with a certain subtlety about its experimentation. It’s actually one of the most listenable albums that…

A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Got me? Ahem…I mean: welcome back to another (hopefully) enthralling episode of Heavy Vanguard! Apologies for the two-week delay in episodes. For some reason, the WordPress scheduling program doesn’t like this article very much. Today we’ve got what is possibly the…

We’re back! And thanks to everyone who listened to our first episode: it really means a lot to us. And a big special thanks to one Greg Greenberg for making some bitchin’ intro music for us! (I forgot to add that last week—my bad.) This week, however, we’ve got something…